SLPro Conference Day 1: A Rocky Start but...

The key note got off to a rocky start with most participants not able to get audio and video for much of the time. But the big announcment is SL's Viewer 2 which we get to preview! Looks like a cleaner interface and my impression is that Viewer 2 renders graphics more rapidly than the current viewer.

But what is really cool is the viewer's shared media feature. One thing that I and other "content devlopers" in Second Life have groused about is the inability to display interactive sorts of media such as, well web pages. With the current Second Life viewer the user can display a web page by replacing using the llLoadUrl function but you can't interact with it. But now you can.

After the keynote we got to play for example with a drawing program and we could all interact with it in real time even though it was displayed as a texture on a prim. If you use a web page as a texture you can not only see the web page but you can scroll through the web page and even open new links just as with a standard browser!

Ahhh but there is more. Currently when you display a web page it uses you're parcel media feature which means only one medium per parcel. So if you are a teacher and want to display say multiple web pages you can't have them all display at the same time unless you subdivide your parcel into smaller parcels. Now you can!

This is a big deal for SL content providers and really integrates SL with the web. I just had to try it and works as advertised. So this image shows two of my blogs on separate prim's and these are all on the same parcel. You can do the same thing with media such as Flash sites opening up a new potential for gaming in SL.

I have just started working with this feature so don't have more to say about it...but it looks like web on a prim is here finally. and I think it is really going to improve the immersive experience in Second Life. I can almost forgive the keynote glitches for this.